LVPEI eye bank reckoned as one of the five biggest in the world, sums up our effort and passion: Dr Gullapalli N Rao

L V Prasad Eye Institute was founded a little over 25 years with a simple vision of reconciling excellence with equity and providing same quality care to all people irrespective of their social economic status and whether they pay or don’t pay.Shahid Akhter | ETHealthWorld | Updated: August 05, 2016, 17:48 IST

L V Prasad Eye Institute was founded a little over 25 years with a simple vision of reconciling excellence with equity and providing same quality care to all people irrespective of their social economic status and whether they pay or don’t pay. We are fortunate that we have been able to implement it without any reservation till date.

It’s a six component functional structure covered by a 5 tier functional model. Patient care, education, research, rehabilitation of a reversible blind, large segment of rural and community eye health and product development are the six functional components. So we take care of everything that happens in the eye and in everything that we do includes service, education and research.

We have touched nearly 19 million by our direct services which cover around 2000 villages providing high quality eye care. In terms of tertiary care we cover the entire population because people from all over India and a number of neighbouring countries come to us. So each day we cover 5000 people at the least through our various programmes.

We have at any given point about 500 trainees from all over the world on our campuses, from ophthalmologist to the field workers working in remote rural areas. We also have students pursuing PHD in various basic research areas. Our publication track record has been quite good and versus one of the most productive eye research units in the world today.

We are very proud of our eye banking as we are the first international standard eye bank anywhere in Asia and one of the five biggest in the world. In terms of rehabilitation of incurable blind, we were the first to integrate that as an essential component of an eye institute. We are now located in 150 different areas of the three states of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Orissa which is the biggest such network anywhere in the world.

We have been involved in the capacity building of many organisation in the world, over 200 eye care organisations in India and organisations in 16 countries outside have partnership with us. So we are a global organisation today touching nearly 200 billion.

As we look forward we thought we should get into technology innovation and that is why we are seeing this innovation centre which was started in the recent past. Technology innovation is important. Today it is extremely expensive to access technology for early diagnosis and treatment. The vision behind this innovation centre is to get the best of technology available to the poorest of the people in the world.

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